


Reboot

by Bright_Elen



Series: Reset [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Comfort to come in part 3 of the series, Established Relationship, M/M, POV K-2SO, Psychological Trauma, Time Loop, Violence, a glimmer of hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:09:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23882797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: K-2SO calculates.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/K-2SO
Series: Reset [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1721428
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22





	Reboot

K-2SO calculates. 

As always, he compares the corridor he's standing in to the thirty-two previous iterations of this moment. The bodies on the floor appear identical to themselves thirty-two times before. The only variations in the first twenty-nine seconds have been, and still are, within his own processes. 

At 0.819 milliseconds, he's running simulations of the best way to eliminate the nameless, frustratingly unclassifiable threat coming towards him.

Towards Cassian, who K-2 knows is behind him, despite the interference that's disabled his auditory sensors and scrambled his tactile network. He is certain: Cassian is there. Cassian is there, and fragile in his humanity, and K-2SO is the only thing standing between him and the threat.

K-2SO calculates, as fast as he is able, possible means of ending the current scenario with a desirable outcome. He has, if this iteration is of median length, two hundred and eighty-nine seconds before he suffers permanent shutdown. 

K-2SO can do a lot in two hundred and eighty-nine seconds, especially since he's not starting over from scratch. He doesn't know why he retains memory data of each iteration when everything else reverts to a shared start point, but he knows how to take advantage of it.

These calculations are both easier and more difficult than any he has previously made. Easier, to have so much data to extrapolate from; harder, to have to archive his own distress over and over again, because he always dies, and dying is distressing.

Watching Cassian die is worse.

At first, K-2SO speculated that a digital attack or virus had caught him in an infinite command-prompt loop. It began as the most likely explanation. If he is, the only escape is to force a shutdown and hope that he can avoid the loop on rebooting. Or, if he can't, that there will be someone else  _ (Cassian,  _ he hopes, has hoped, will hope) to help him. 

During the eighth iteration, he began to consider the possibility that the threat, or something related to it, has made a loop in spacetime instead of his software. It would account for the variable time it takes Cassian to reach him; for the fact that in six of the iterations, Cassian hasn't reached him at all. Since then, K-2 has been testing the loops, trying to learn something new in each iteration. This time, his experiment requires him to activate his atmospheric pressure sensor, the reading appearing in his HUD.

Every time, K-2SO faces the threat. His optics register a distortion of light creating the appearance of smoke or shadows where there are none. Foreign bodies thrown into it have no effect. 

He does not know if the threat is sentient. Too much of it is beyond his perception, even when his sensors are working properly. His range of vision is almost human in its narrowness. 

The threat draws near, and K-2SO braces himself. He waits until it's close enough to reach into, and overloads the circuits in his hands, discharging electricity into it. This adds fourteen point eight seconds to his continued existence. 

The distortion reacts by moving into K-2. The effect is immediate and comprehensive: electrical impulses randomly appear and disappear from circuits; components suddenly melt under intense temperatures, while others lose heat altogether; and a great deal of parts corrode with alarming, unnatural speed.

The exact placement and extent of the damage is slightly different in each iteration, but most end in the same result: his chassis fails and he falls backwards.

The impact does not register in his sensors, or, sometimes, registers in the wrong ones: his infrared detecting sudden heat at his back, or his antennae being overwhelmed with static. He falls. Lies still. The damage continues, disabling his optics.

This is usually when Cassian arrives. K-2 should not be able to see him, yet he does, as if through a device other than his optics. Or — the atmospheric pressure display in the corner of his field of impossible vision confirming — as if through his optics two minutes prior. The threat is temporal.

Cassian arrives, distraught. Kneels next to K-2.

All K-2 can think is  _ NO  _ and _ GET AWAY _ and _ RUN!,  _ no matter that he knows the outcome.

Cassian touches him, and K-2 can't feel it at all. Cassian touches him, and K-2 detects his familiar pattern of pressure and vibration and temperature in fine detail. Cassian touches him, and it triggers all of K-2's carefully-saved memories of Cassian's hands on his chassis, every methodical repair and trembling caress.

It's harder and harder, longing to touch Cassian one last time.

It's harder and harder to bear his powerlessness to protect Cassian as the threat overtakes him. Sometimes he shuts down permanently almost immediately; sometimes he is forced to watch the same processes of displacement and decay ravage Cassian's body. The worst time was the fourteenth, when Cassian and K-2 both continued to exist for almost ten minutes, helpless as their systems slowly failed. But K-2 feels anguish in every iteration, reaching for unresponsive limbs over and over, for unresponsive processes. 

More than anything, K-2 wishes he'd taken Cassian somewhere safe whether he agreed or not. He might have hated K-2 for it, but he would have been alive to do so.

This time, Cassian dies in a relatively short fifty-six seconds. K-2 shuts down permanently one point seven awful seconds after that. The iteration terminates, and a new one begins.

K-2SO compares the corridor to the thirty-three previous iterations of this moment. Sees the bodies on the floor. Accesses his archived simulations of the best way to eliminate the threat. Despite disabled sensors, K-2 knows Cassian is there, just as he knows that he is Cassian's only protection.

Now he also knows that the iterations are a time loop, and that the threat kills by disrupting the temporal coherence inside bodies: accelerating time in some areas, slowing it in others, perhaps even reversing it. He does not yet know how to use this data, but he is nothing if not good at testing variables and processing huge datasets. 

It is agony, dying and seeing Cassian die over and over. But with each iteration, K-2 learns more. With each iteration, he comes closer to a solution. He will endure as many iterations as necessary to save Cassian.

K-2SO calculates.


End file.
